TRANSLANGUAGING AND MULTIMODAL MEANING-MAKING: A SOCIO-SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF CODESWITCHING IN NIGERIAN WHATSAPP MEMES

This paper repositions the study of Nigerian internet memes as a question of bilingual and multilingual practice rather than of humour or political commentary alone. While a growing body of Nigerian meme scholarship has examined memes through multimodal critical discourse lenses, comparatively little attention has been paid to the codeswitching and translanguaging that underlie meme construction itself — the moment-to-moment movement between English, Nigerian Pidgin, and indigenous languages such as Igbo that Nigerian netizens draw on, alongside visual and gestural modes, to construct layered meaning. Adopting a qualitative multimodal discourse analysis (MMDA) within a social semiotic framework (Halliday, 1978; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), and drawing on translanguaging theory (García & Wei, 2014; Canagarajah, 2013), the study analyses sixteen purposively sampled memes collected from Nigerian WhatsApp groups over a period of twelve months [2024-2025], categorised as politically, socio-culturally, religiously, and humorously motivated. Findings show that translanguaged memes function as agentive semiotic acts that compress complex socio-political realities into emotionally resonant, code-fluid messages; that language choice within a single meme indexes audience intimacy, humour register, and ideological stance; and that the interplay of linguistic hybridity and visual mode allows socially and politically muted voices to participate in national discourse while performing an everyday, unplanned form of bilingual identity. The study argues that Nigerian WhatsApp memes are best understood not as isolated linguistic or visual artefacts but as translanguaging spaces, and it considers what this evidence of organic, high-stakes multilingual meaning-making outside the classroom might contribute to bilingual education research and pedagogy in multilingual Nigeria.